


Atmospheric Acoustics

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 20:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20121019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Traveling with Quill and his companions comes with several preconditions and quid pro quos, as Sif discovers, one of which is agreeing to a few contract jobs that involve false identities and fabricated backstories.She didn't sign up for also getting an up-close demonstration of Thor's newfound powers, but she'll consider that part a bonus.





	Atmospheric Acoustics

**Author's Note:**

> A prompt by the delightful and hilarious @chrishemsworth on tumblr, where you may have already seen this; the idea was to explore Sif's reaction to Thor's new lightning abilities and how she might respond.

…

The contract job had originally gone out to bid at five hundred thousand units, although Quill had argued their client’s price as high as five hundred and twenty on the merits of their preceding reputation: minus the pirate-angel dude and the chick with the shield, Quill had clarified. We’ll throw their services in free as a bonus.

The bonus, as it turns out, is that pictures of Quill and Rocket and Drax and Groot and Nebula and even Mantis, wearing a bright smile, appear in the black books of every bounty hunter in the galaxy – bringing half the universe back from the dead garners one far less goodwill than it ought – and while the word ‘plucky’ does not exist in their professional parlance, it would seem the word ‘subterfuge’ most certainly does.

Which is how, in short, Sif finds herself seated beside Thor at a table in some glitzy free-and-easy on Korbin, cutting cards with a war profiteer whose stainless steel front tooth contains an encrypted silicon microchip they have been tasked with retrieving. Whether or not the murdering asshole’s head is still attached to his tooth after they retrieve it, Quill has informed them, is a detail he’ll leave to their own better judgement.

(Sif has decided she likes Peter Quill, who is loyal unto death to the crew whom he calls his family and who has given Thor a place among them through his wanderings, because in doing so he has brought her oldest friend back to her.

She has not, however, been able to understand Thor’s vexation over her habit of addressing Quill as _Captain Star-Lord,_ especially seeing as how this is the man’s proper title and is only polite as one warrior speaking to another.)

Thor leans capaciously forward in his chair at the table. He wears the eye-patch and has gathered back his hair at the nape of his neck, and together with his beard and his long scarlet coat and his imposing, heavy figure it really does make him look the part of an archetypal interstellar brigand. The private room where they sit has golden lacquer-painted walls and a light fixture sparkling with incandescent glass globes shaped like grape clusters.

“—But that’s just how it is these days, you know,” Thor is saying. “Everybody suddenly comes back to life and we’ve got to scramble about like we’re new and green to this business all over again.”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been green to it, myself,” the man with the steel tooth says. “I took it over from my father, the poor old bastard. But I’ll admit I enjoyed those five years without the competition – I’ll take a guess and say you were one of the ones who got the snap, were you?”

Thor has been swirling a filled whiskey glass without tasting it. His wrist pauses.

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

Sif says nothing. They had planned out their stories in the platinum-plated elevator that carried them up here to the building’s hundredth floor; Thor is meant to be playing the part of an arms dealer – then I’ll do this after I’ve introduced myself, he had said, and with a touch of his old gamesome humor he had given his right bicep a pump – and Sif, dressed in black, is playing his personal guard. The knives she wears at her wrists are mostly for theatrics, since if it comes down to a close-quarter fight she can just as well snap their target’s neck. It will save her from cleaning the blades later: but, then again, the file had mentioned how their war profiteer in question runs a prosperous side business as a trafficker, so she has no special preference either way. 

“And what sort of wages does your arms dealer pay his personal protection?” she had asked Thor, in the elevator. “That should help me figure out a few performative nuances.”

Thor had leaned against the wall. “More than she demands but far less than she deserves, I suppose.”

“If that’s the case, he should expect to receive her notice of departure on his desk by next week. She can do better than that, even in this economy.”

“Ah, but he plans on inviting her into a full partnership with him,” Thor had said. “He’s just been waiting for the right time to make his offer.”

“What, is he shy about it?”

“More slow in the head than shy, I’m afraid.” 

Sif adjusts the slim blades strapped to her forearms. Across the table from her sits an enormous humanoid with twin plasma blasters in his belt, coarse hair that grows in a ridge down his neck and curved tusks like a boar’s protruding from his mouth. He has not taken his eyes off her since she entered the room; he grins, when he catches her studying him, and so Sif grins back.

The man with the steel tooth quaffs his liquor. He has the young and cold-eyed face of a child accustomed to getting replacements for the toys it breaks.

“What I mean to say by all that,” he tells Thor, “is I appreciate your offer, but I can get the same caliber and muzzle velocity you’re selling for half that price and none of the hassle. To hear you talk, I’d think you’ve actually been out of this trade for five hundred years instead of five.”

“Maybe I have.” Thor sits back again and smiles. He sets down his glass to tap his smallest finger against its rim. “One man’s minute can be another man’s lifetime.”

“If the man’s about to die, it may very well feel like both at once.”

“Yes, if he’s lucky,” Thor says. “Or if he isn’t.” 

The profiteer’s right hand slips below the table to take hold of something; it comes back holding a two-barreled blaster and he levels its sight-post between Sif’s eyes.

Sif reaches to grasp the sword she wears strapped against her back, beneath her coat; the big boar-tusked guard gets up, and here they all pause.

“So much for subterfuge.” Sif pulls the sword free from its sheath with a long, pure note. A flourish of her wrist brings it around to a guarded position. “I told you I could’ve just punched him and knocked that tooth out at the beginning.”

The smile, however, and even with the prospect of combat there in front of him, has dropped right off Thor’s face. Sif does not recognize the expression that has taken its place but feels the delicate hairs on her arms suddenly stand up straight.

“You shouldn’t point that at her.” Thor gestures toward the gun. “If you’ll stand down, I may let you live to regret it.”

The man licks his dry lips and flicks off the safety on his weapon. His finger teases the trigger.

“Not nearly as much as you’ll –”

A bolt of lightning, white and hot and violent as a dying star, leaps from Thor’s empty hand. 

The fixture above their heads explodes in a spurt of glass and the table cracks to pieces as thunder rips a furrow down the air. Sif is thrown by the stunning impact and feels a plasma blast scorch past her ear; she rolls into a somersault when a second spike of lightning impales the guard whose second weapon is still only half-drawn. She hears a deep hum in all the circuits of the hundred-story building below them, and then there is a dazzling synaptic climax through the wires and the lights of the room go black. Windows erupt from their frames and spray the cold night air like silver sparklers.

There is a ringing in Sif’s ears. She has landed on her back and blinks several times to clear the green spots from her vision.

Thor has risen from his chair; he seems illumined from within by a snapping, hissing white-blue light that crackles along the veins in his hands and seethes from his mouth as he takes a few harsh, angry breaths. Threads of electricity jump between the pulse points in his body and the charged atmosphere around him.

He looks down at her.

And since she woke, since she came back from her dreamless five-year sleep, Sif has noted a change in herself. It is a sort of premonitory quickness through her blood, like the shiver of a plucked bowstring, as though the physical matter from which she is made can somehow recall that it is the same elemental dust from which all other life has been created. It happens, now, and the feeling of affinity thrills so strongly up her spine that she shudders.

When this passes – she can do nothing about the highly inappropriate sensation of heat that has flowered below her rib-cage, which she will have to contemplate later – she stands up. She realizes too late that she is actually holding a hand clapped to her bosom, like some histrionic damsel in a ballad, but she expects Thor will not notice. Her pulse has climbed into her throat and she must swallow it before she can speak.

“Is that new?”

The lightning goes out of his eyes. They are plunged into darkness and it masks the two dead men at Thor’s feet. He waggles his fingers to throw a few last blue sparks.

“In a manner of speaking.” He extricates his boots from the wreckage of the table to swat the ceiling plaster off his hair. Static makes the trailing red coat-tails cling to his thighs. “I’m still working out the particulars, though. I can’t get socks to stop sticking to me.”

She stares at him. Watching him channel the lightning through Mjolnir all those centuries, holding the hammer up to receive its pale, roaring fire from heaven, she had always wondered how his body withstood the power coursing through it. But it appears her thinking has been misguided; he is the source, not the conduit. 

“Does it hurt?”

He pauses. “No.”

Her ears have yet to stop ringing. Thor holds her arms to set her on her balance again while she stands there. “That wasn’t especially fair on your part,” she says. “You know how I hate to be cheated out of a good fight.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your chance at another soon enough.”

“You didn’t use your joke about the arms dealing, either.”

“It wasn’t all that funny, now that I think about it.”

His hands are much warmer than usual. There is still a thrumming through his body, too, like the steady reverberation of a quieting engine as it cools; the energy travels right down to her feet and makes her toes curl. They have stood in identical relation to one another this way, many times before, but his broadened arms and belly fill the marginal spaces that would otherwise remain between them so that Sif is uncertain whether she is expected to move further away or not. She stays where she is.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t really plan on having to kill him.”

“Well, you didn’t kill him. I did.”

“Are you all right?”

“Me? Of course.” He claps his hands companionably onto her shoulders. “And you’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” 

She waits for him to say something more. He never does, so they wait there with the silence collecting around them until the elevator bangs to signal an upcoming arrival. Sif ducks beneath Thor’s arm – he releases her – and goes to where the dead profiteer lies on his side. The steel tooth uproots when she pulls it twice.

“Do you suppose the monolithic integrated circuit’s been damaged?”

“No, I wouldn’t expect it to be. Steel’s got a comparatively higher electrical resistivity. What do you think my silly helmet with the wings was made from?”

“I happened to like your helmet.” She stands and pockets the tooth. “Just when were you planning to apprise me of that new trick of yours, by the way?”

“Oh.” Thor smooths the front of his red coat. “I was hoping it’d be sort of a surprise, actually.”

“Then you’ll be pleased to know it was – but don’t let yourself get too smug about it.” She picks a shard of glass from her hair. “Is there anything else you’ve been meaning to tell me?”

He pats himself down one more time. 

“Nope.”

The back stairwell is dark when the reach it. Thor toggles his wrist to summon a handful of that same furious, living electricity and lights their way down together, though he pauses at every third landing or so to determine she is still behind him.

…


End file.
